Snowflakes
by SILENTSANCTUARY
Summary: Translucent crystalline flakes fall outside my window & I am thinking of spinning you around and around in a circle until we fall into the grasp of this winter wonderland. PAIRINGS: YUKIXMACHI, possibly some TOHRUXKYO. Rated T for some dark themes.
1. END

One day, it suddenly occurrs to her that she would never be free of her chains that fetters her to a black and white world of depression.

She slides herself out of the bed for the first time in days, and walks barefooted to the bathroom. In the mirror, she sees her gaunt expression in the mirror, and smiles crookedly to herself as she opens the medicine cabinet.

Her fingers close upon the first bottle she touches, and brings it down from the shelf. Success, so far. Her heart beats a million paces a minute, and she tenses herself in case anyone happens to walk in. No one does.

She dumps the painkiller bottle upside down and the capsules rain down, clacking into the sink. She scoops out a handful, and throws them all into her mouth. She looks at her reflection in the mirror again, before she swallows down. Hard.


	2. NOLIGHTS

The world is spinning, and she is colliding. There are people whispering, but she can't distinguish their voices. There are sirens wailing, but she can't silence them.


	3. DREAMSCAPE

There are thoughts, and they have landscapes. She wanders around this surreal world, and finds that some memories are particularly beautiful like the silver sheen to a metallic chrome surface. But not all memories are beautiful, because there are some ugly ones, corroded and deformed in shapeless masses of black.


	4. OO1: PERFECTION

**ONE.**

Even to this day, she still can't quite get rid of that feeling when you stand in front of a blackboard with the rest of the class staring you down, and you have a math problem in front of you. It is a feeling of panic, like a bird trying to beat its wings in a cage. There are two options: get the answer right, and be humiliated when the teacher congratulates you, thus garnering mixed respect and/or resentment from your peers, OR get the answer wrong, and be humiliated when the teacher scolds you, but at least the rest of the class won't hate you because your failure would make them feel secretly triumphant of their own intelligence.

Like many situations before, she was standing in front of the blackboard, a simple math problem upon the blackboard. Her hand trembled; she knew the answer but she didn't know what she should do. A few minutes passed and her classmates started to murmur. Insults were exchanged, and snickers followed. The teacher rose, called her name, and asked if she could hurry and come up with the answer.

She picked up the piece of chalk, hovered over the blank line below, and wrote down the answer in the clear legible handwriting her mother had always drilled into her. She stepped back, the teacher looked over the answer, and then nodded in agreement.

Always the perfect child.


	5. OO2: THEWRONGANSWER

**TWO**

Funny, because when the teacher told her to "hurry up and come up with the answer," it was highly nostalgic of her mother, and more predominately, her study sessions. Poring over sheets of algebraic questions, if she spent a little too much time over one problem, her mother would repeat the same condescending words: _"hurry up and come up with the answer."_ Her nose would rise in disgust over her failure, her one imperfection.

And with sweat gathering at her forehead, she would write the answer promptly on the sheet. If she got it right, her mother dismissed it as necessary. If she got it wrong, she was rewarded with a slap across the face.


	6. OO3: NOTAPPLICABLE

**THREE.**

Test questions are a lot like life or death situations. If you answer correctly, you live to suffer for another day. If you answer incorrectly, you are immediately killed, and your life ends over a petty question. Maybe you go to heaven, and you become an angel. Or maybe you go to hell, and you become the devil.

To her, there was_ never_ an answer in between. It was either, yes or no, true or false, a or b. Her mother had taught her if you lived that way, you were guaranteed success.

So when she took her first survey, she was horribly confused and lost. They became a scrabble of questions that she couldn't find a right answer to.

Describe your greatest dream.  
___________________________ (Write in two sentences or more.)

For her answer, she wrote a tentative N/A. Not applicable to her.


	7. OO4: SNOWFLAKES

**FOUR.**

There is something lovely and heart wrenching about the snowflake. When it is first created, it is a perfect symmetrical crystal like a million other carbon copies. But when it falls, it loses this pristine form and joins together with other snowflakes to form a clump. This clump of snow ungracefully lands in someone's backyard, and it stays for maybe a couple of weeks depending on the weather; but once spring rolls around, it melts into water, and it becomes almost nonexistent. It becomes something that fades into the background, and turns invisible.

When it snowed the first time in her childhood, she was looking outside the window of her room, listless. She returned to her bed, and found it cluttered with mess, so she pushed this all off and dove deep within the covers. Later, she heard a thumping sound of her window, and saw a half-melted snowball sliding down her window glass. She opened it, and found a little snowman sitting on her windowsill with a small hat, and pebbles that formed the eyes, the nose and the smiling mouth.

She looks beyond the yard, and sees someone running out with his back turned to her. Someone with silver hair, and a blue cap covered over his eyes. The yard door swings shut when he exits.

She admired the snowman built outside her window, and brought it inside her room where it sat on her dresser amid a small puddle of melting ice. When she slid the window down to keep it shut against the cold elements of winter, she found words written upon the frosty surface by someone's finger. _Merry Christmas,_ it had read._ I saw you the other day, and I couldn't help but feel that you're lonely. _


	8. OO5: IMPERFECTIONS

**FIVE**

They always tease her. They gather in groups and make snide remarks as she walks past the courtyard and into the school building. When she opens her locker to place her gym shoes inside, she finds the outside scribbled with words written by a red marker.

Freak.

Know it all bitch.

Go back home and suck your textbooks.

She slams the locker door shut, and breaks the plastic door handle. She is screaming in the inside, but the perfect child doesn't scream. The perfect child has to lock all her emotions in a black box, and throw the key away.

She goes into the classroom with her mismatched socks, and shoes on the wrong side of her feet. Her hair is disarray, and her fingernails are chipped. The teacher asks her what is wrong, but she shakes her head and looks blankly at her notebook in front of her.

Nothing is wrong when you're supposed to be perfect.


	9. OO6: PAWNS

**SIX**

Home life is quite secluded. She has no hobbies, no passions that give her ambition in life. For her, everything is about pleasing her mother, and fulfilling _her_ own dreams. And that is for her to inherit her father's fortune. At all costs, she must find ways to bring her half-brother down. Her half-brother, the bastard of her father's illegitimate relationship with his mistress.

She and Kakeru had always lived in separate wings of her father's estate. They had never seen each other until that fateful day when the chains were first broken.

Screaming could be heard from the end of the hall, and it was coming from the dining room. She happened to be passing down the same hallway, so with a mild curiousity, she peeked into the dining room with caution. Standing in the middle of the grand dining table was a black-haired boy she assumed was Kakeru.

She watched him kick his father's fine china down from the table, and shatter in myriad pieces. He threw one at the wall, which narrowly missed his mother's head. He went on this tirade for a long time, until his father's chinaware was gone, and he had to settle with screaming the words he was saying over and over again.

"I WON'T PLAY YOUR STUPID GAME. I WON'T PLAY YOUR STUPID GAME."

Several days later, her mother told her that Kakeru's mother had withdrawn his studies. "Good for you," she had whispered as she looked outside the window to see him kick the leaves that scattered the ground while his mother looked helplessly on. "At least you are free."

_" - - from this endless chess game where both of us are pawns, and the ones that propels us to make the right moves are our parents. Get out of this game while you can, because if you stay too long in it, it becomes your prison, your life."_


	10. OO7: PAINKILLER

You don't need the sharp end of a razor blade to feel pain. Pain is present in every situation and environment. You can accidentally bump your shin on the corner of a desk. Someone can run into you while you're passing through the hallways. You can torture yourself mentally; bend your mind towards pain so that it no longer affects you. Every living thing in this universe experiences pain; even the moth turns into ashes when it flies too close to fire. So why should pain be any different for you?

You think this when the tingle of your mother's slap still lingers upon the red of your cheek. You think this when you breakdown in your room and throw your sheets and clothes around in frenzy, imperfections spilling out from the shell you have always kept it in. You feel numb all the time, because unlike the sharp sting of pain, pain has become a dull-edged intangible feeling that douses you in undulations of cold.

* * *

It was around that time when the silver-haired boy that had left the snowman near her window so many seasons ago, begins to show up in places where she needed it the most. Signs of his former presence varied from the white cherry blossom petals arranged in patterns on the plane of ground below her window, to messages written on pieces of paper wedged into the smallest cracks. For a while, this made her hope and believe in something that was the variable and the unseen. The feeling came gradually and slowly as if it was tentative to enter into someone as plain and untrusting as herself, but with the gifts bestowed by the stranger, it grew stronger.

It was something that she always hid from her mother in an irrational fear that this newfound hope might be taken away with her, just like how her mother had taken away any obstacles that included friends away from the path to academic success that she had laid in front of her. In secret, she responded to the messages hidden in a crack near her window where the stranger eventually came to wedge it in. She never attempted to seek him out, scared that the stranger would never return if she found out his identity. Instead, she waited for the two thumps that signaled his entry and exit in the backyard, before she felt for the piece of paper wedged into the crack. She would write in it with a few spare words, and return it to the hiding spot. The next morning, it would be gone, and by the end of the evening, the paper would reappear in its spot.

_"You and I, are not so much different from each other," _he wrote before. _"We both come from similar family backgrounds, and our situations are alike. It makes me feel - -_

_- - A little less lonely in this world."_


	11. OO8: PAPERSNOWMAN

"_How did I come to know you? _

_I saw you at the corner of my eye, like a weak candle flame that is extinguished the moment you pass by it. The same applies to me. When I saw you for the first time, we passed by each other on the street, and for that inscrutable moment, I decided to look back. But the moment I did, you were gone, and you left me wondering what kind of person you were. Isn't it funny how we pass by hundreds of strangers a day, but we never really take the time to ponder about their identities? That day, the thought might have crossed my mind that I never got to really know anyone because my mother had always restricted my company to the head of the family, like how someone builds a fence to mark the limits to his or her own property._

_The second time I saw you, you were sitting on school steps with your hair pulled back in a severe matronly way that I thought that was oppressing to you. I thought it might have been nice if your hair was unrestrained, blowing in the breeze with the tendrils crossing your face as you laughed. But you didn't laugh then, your mouth was in a straight puckered line and your eyes were lifeless like a flower that has been kept in the dark for far too long. You seemed to be poring over textbooks the size of dictionaries, far too big of a context for someone as young as you. Girls your age back then played skip rope on the streets and played hopscotch on chalk-drawn boxes. Seeing you bent over in study on those street steps, I felt sorry for you. I wanted to throw those books away, take your hand and show you the _world.

_The third time I saw you, you were with your mother. I hid in the shadows, blue cap covering my face. You passed by me without noticing, or maybe it was because you were far too preoccupied to detect my presence. Even while walking you weren't given a moment's rest, for your mother was drilling you in vocabulary. I saw your fingers nervously play around with the ends of your shirt, as you responded to every one in a voice that was reminiscent of mines when I talked with my elders – reserved and emotionless. I followed you until you reached your house, where I hid behind the shrubbery. At that moment, a wrong answer spilled from your lips and your mother stopped in her tracks and grabbed your arm. She threw the flashcards she had her hands onto the ground before you and told you to study for an extra hour, calling you a stupid, useless child. _

_When she left, I saw you pick up those flashcards wearily and tuck them inside your shirt before you trekked back into the house. And at that moment, I had just realized something, from looking at the snow covered around me, and the cherry blossom tree in your garden that bore no flowers._

_It was Christmas Day. _

She tucked the note under her pillow, and looked outside at the snowflakes swirling around in dreamlike patterns. It was February, and it was still snowing. Maybe he would come by in the middle of the day and build her a snowman like that fateful Christmas Day. But then again, it was only snowing lightly and there was probably not enough snow to build one.

She rolled over to the side and saw the white tip of the note sticking out from under her pillow. Wanting to read the words again for comfort and peace, she pulled it out from beneath her covers and unfolded it. It was only then did she realize that on the other side of the sheet was a crudely drawn snowman with miniscule snow falling down from a cloud drawn on the top.

It seemed that he had not forgotten either.


End file.
